O n f e r e n c e

Short paper 
Current Research 
A pedagogical need
Many factors affect the acquisition of Spanish past tense aspects, preterite and imperfect, 
in the classroom setting. The terminology and technical jargon used in standard textbook 
explanations and grammar rules often confuse learners (Blyth, 2005; Dansereau, 1987; 
Hwu, 2004). Further, some grammar explanations or rules are vague, incomplete, and 
misleading. (Blyth, 1997, 2005; Frantzen, 1995; Hwu, 2004, 2005; Westfall & Foerster, 
1996; see Dansereau, 1987; Garrett, 1986). Furthermore, since speakers begin with 
meaning in formulating an utterance, but grammar rules focus on explaining the overall 
workings of the language system, they are not always useful to L2 learners (Garrett, 
1986; Hwu, 2004), who want to know the meaning conveyed by a verb. 
A distributional bias in the input probably leads learners to wrongfully assume that all 
stative verbs (e.g., “want,” “have,” and “like”) should be encoded in imp
erfect and all 
punctual verbs, (e.g., “recognize someone,” “realize something,” and “find something) 
should be encoded in preterite (Anderson, 1993, 1994). Empirical studies confirm that 
learners have difficulty with non-prototypical uses of Spanish aspect, e.g., stative verbs 
with preterite, which lead researchers to suggest that teachers should supply their 
students with input that contains more tokens and types of non-prototypical usages, 
especially at the intermediate stage (Blyth, 2005, Salaberry, 2005).
As learners must be able to embed a spontaneous conversational story in the on-going 
talk (Blyth, 2005), this narrative type is probably the most cognitively and linguistically 
complex along a continuum of narrative genres: routine, report, fairytale, and 
conversational story/short story (Blyth, 2002). Because standard textbook explanations 
and grammar rules focus almost exclusively on story-telling, excluding spontaneous 
everyday conversation, and the classroom settings does not lend itself to working on this 
discourse type, the opportunity for classroom learners to learn the use of Spanish simple 
past tense in a communicative context is critically lacking (Hwu, 2004, 2005).